When Fear Governs

By: Rodrigo Arboleda - 10/08/2026

What Leonardo Padura Teaches Us About Power, Fear, and Democracy

A couple of years ago, during the Hay Festival in Cartagena, I had the privilege of attending one of those conversations that linger in the mind long after the audience has dispersed. The guest was the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, who spoke about The Man Who Loved Dogs, his extraordinary novel centered on the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader, the Stalinist agent who carried out one of the most emblematic political crimes of the twentieth century.

I bought the book that very day, as I have so many others by authors first encountered at the Hay Festival. For some reason, however, it remained forgotten on my bookshelf. Only recently, during a long journey and the many hours of waiting that usually accompany it, did I finally decide to read it on my Kindle. When I reached the final page, I realized that I had waited far too long.

Padura reconstructs one of the most dramatic episodes of the last century with remarkable historical precision. Yet the novel’s true significance extends far beyond Soviet history. It compels us to examine something much deeper: the nature of power when it becomes governed by fear.

We often imagine dictators as men of unbreakable will—self-assured, resolute, almost invulnerable. Reading Padura leads to a very different conclusion. Stalin did not govern from a position of confidence. He governed from fear.

He feared Trotsky. He feared those who had fought beside him. He feared intellectuals. He feared any potential alternative source of leadership. He even feared his most loyal collaborators.

That fear eventually became paranoia. And paranoia produced purges, show trials, deportations, assassinations, and a vast machinery of terror that ultimately devoured even many of the revolution’s most committed defenders.

Perhaps this is one of Padura’s most penetrating insights: tyrants do not govern because they are free from fear. They govern precisely because they are consumed by it. In seeking to protect themselves, they eventually transform their personal fear into the fear of an entire nation.

Therein lies one of the most perverse mechanisms of authoritarianism.

If the ruler suspects everyone, society as a whole learns to be suspicious.

If he fears dissent, dissent ceases to be a right and becomes a crime.

If he needs enemies to justify his power, enemies will eventually be invented.

Little by little, fear ceases to be an individual emotion and becomes the political culture of a country.

Millions of people embraced the Marxist-Leninist ideal in good faith, convinced that they were helping to build a more just society. Yet that aspiration was eventually hijacked by the paranoia of a single man. The revolution ceased to serve its principles and came to serve only the preservation of power.

That, perhaps, is the novel’s deeper message. It is not merely a work directed against one particular ideology. It is a profound reflection on what happens when the limits on power disappear and fear replaces the principles that originally gave life to a political project.

It would be a grave mistake to believe that such a tragedy belongs exclusively to the twentieth century.

The cult of personality, extreme polarization, the manipulation of information, the erosion of institutions, and the gradual weakening of democratic checks and balances continue to appear in different forms throughout the world. Latin America has not been immune.

As I continued reading, I was reminded of another book that has accompanied me for many years: Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View. Schwartz became widely known for his work in strategic planning and scenario development, including his years at Royal Dutch Shell.

He argues that great transformations are never built by thinking only about the coming week—or even the next election. They are built over decades. In industries such as oil and gas, twenty or twenty-five years may pass between the earliest exploration efforts and the moment when it is finally possible to determine whether a major decision was sound. That discipline requires us to think in long-term horizons.

Authoritarian movements seem to have understood this logic remarkably well.

They do not work solely to win the next election. They train leaders. They construct narratives. They occupy cultural spaces. They influence education. They penetrate institutions. They indoctrinate individuals until they are prepared to carry out actions that would once have seemed unthinkable. Ramón Mercader was one of them. And they wait patiently for favorable circumstances.

Democracies, by contrast, are too often trapped by immediacy: four-year governments, weekly polls, social media, the crisis of the day, and passing scandals.

This difference in strategic horizons is one of democracy’s greatest vulnerabilities.

Defending democracy therefore requires far more than electing good governments. It requires building a democratic culture capable of outlasting governments.

I often remember an anecdote attributed to Monsignor José Joaquín Salcedo, the remarkable founder of Radio Sutatenza in Colombia. As a seminarian, he secretly read the works of Marx and Engels. Those books were prohibited by the Church at the time, and his decision to read them caused him serious difficulties. His response rested on an irrefutable logic: no one can seriously challenge a set of ideas without understanding them as well as—or better than—the person advocating them.

Radio Sutatenza never sought to indoctrinate Colombia’s rural population. It pursued something infinitely more ambitious: teaching people to read, to understand, to think, and to exercise their freedom with independent judgment.

Perhaps therein lies the best defense of any democracy.

Not censorship.

Not propaganda.

Not fear.

But education.

Democracies are not strengthened by prohibiting the ideas that challenge them. They are strengthened by educating citizens capable of understanding those ideas, examining them critically, and responding with better arguments.

Education ultimately proves far more powerful than any propaganda apparatus. It is also far less costly. Education, after all, costs much less than ignorance.

Perhaps that is why I believe The Man Who Loved Dogs should be read not only for its extraordinary literary merit, but also taught in secondary schools and universities. Not because it promotes one political position or another, but because it helps us understand one of the most dangerous mechanisms of power: the transformation of fear into an instrument of domination.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

After reading Padura, those words acquire an even deeper meaning.

Democracies do not survive through inertia. They survive because generation after generation chooses to cultivate them, defend them, and pass them on. And that task always begins with the education of free citizens.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».